An Optimist’s View of Russia

With his invasion of Crimea, deployment of troops and weapons to eastern Ukraine and ruthless oppression at home, President Vladimir Putin of Russia has steered his country far off the democratic track. The promise of the early 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to usher in a new era of rights and freedoms, is over.

Or is it? Andrei Kozyrev, the first foreign minister of post-communist Russia under President Boris Yeltsin, has a more optimistic view. He thinks it is inevitable that Russia “will come back to democracy” — just don’t expect it any time soon.

Since leaving the Russian government – he was forced out as foreign minister in 1996 by opponents who found him too Western – Mr. Kozyrev, 64, has been involved in business, public speaking and writing his memoirs and a novel. Tanned, he now lives in Miami where he devours tomes about democratic change around the world. “The more I read, the less explanation there is” for why and when that change happens, he told me last week during an hour-long conversation in Washington, where he was the guest of the American Foreign Policy Council, a think tank.

Even so, the one-time wunderkind, who became foreign minister at the age of 39, is convinced that the authoritarian, anti-Western system Mr. Putin has re-imposed will not prevail. Mr. Kozyrev argues that most people are innately drawn to democracy, including Russians who made Mr. Yeltsin their first elected president in 1991. More than that, he contends that “Russians are Europeans” who have an affinity for the continent’s dominant religion (Christianity), culture and democratic traditions.

He recalls his own conversion from communism to democratic capitalism clearly. His family escaped village life, and benefited under the Soviet system, in part because his father, an engineer, worked and traveled for the Ministry of Foreign Trade, while two uncles served as colonels in the Soviet army.

After graduating from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations with a Ph.D. in history, Mr. Kozyrev joined the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1974 and eventually made his first trip to New York as a junior member of his country’s delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. The experience shook his communist economic beliefs when he realized that ordinary Americans, not just fat cat capitalists, owned cars and shopped in well-stocked supermarkets and that his somewhat privileged Soviet family lived a life that was actually more akin to that of lower middle-class Americans. He came to understand why Boris Pasternak’s writings were banned in the Soviet Union after spending a day reading “Dr. Zhivago” on a Central Park bench: Rather than an anti-Soviet diatribe it offered something infinitely more threatening, a character who exercised free will.

Mr. Kozyrev does not seem discouraged that opinion polls show strong Russian support for Mr. Putin, his bullying ways and his efforts to destabilize Ukraine. He notes that before taking advantage of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s “glasnost” opening of limited freedom of expression in 1989 to publish an article that repudiated Lenin’s concept of international struggle, “I was keeping my mouth shut” along with most other Russians.

“I was never the hero” like Andrei Sakharov, Mr. Kozyrev says of the iconic human rights campaigner whom the Soviets put under house arrest in Gorky and branded a traitor – until communism crumbled and thousands of Russians stood in his funeral line to pay tribute. “Unfortunately, not everyone is a hero but one day a combination of things comes about which makes it possible for more and more people to speak out and do something,” Mr. Kozyrev said.

He insists that as in Soviet days, “underneath the façade lots of things are going on even today” in Russia and that in time Mr. Putin will be gone and the corrupt system will change quickly, although “when and how is a little bit of a mystery.” Until then, he advises, the West must stand up to Mr. Putin while also leaving room for compromise.